Saturday, April 18, 2009

The Transformation Power of Marketing

Disclaimer: This post is not environmentally friendly. And I apologise for it.

Yan Yan used to be RM1.40 when I was small. It is a pack of biscuit sticks that come with a small container of chocolate syrup. The fun of Yan Yan comes when you can dip the biscuit sticks into the chocolate syrup and 'make your own chocolate biscuit sticks'. Well, the quality of the sticks and chocolate has nothing to mention about.

When I was looking for Yan Yan's picture, I found it in the blog above, which said that Yan Yan is now RM2.30. The increase in price is probably due to inflation.

We learn in marketing, that depending on your product positioning, you can entice people to pay lesser for less, or the other way, make people pay more for more. By making your product looks a class above the current one, you have the power to set a grossly higher price, and people will still pay for it.

Introducing the 'Yan Yan' that is 5 times more expensive - Pocky Dessert. A pack of biscuit sticks look for classy that it makes you feel like you are eating dessert in a café. Cost? S$4.50 (RM11.25)

Very well packaged. Nice colour, nice presentation of product. The box quality is obviously better, made up of smooth, thick, glossy paper. Probably waterproof. =P

The box comes with thoughtfully prepared tear strips. The sticks are grouped into packs of 3. Even the plastic packaging is of high quality - thick and smooth, with labels and decorating strips.

Voila! The product looks exactly the same as that on the packaging, except that the pink colour is slightly paler. The strawberry flavoured stripes wind around the vanilla-flavour-covered sticks meticulously and painstakingly. No stripes are merged together like those low-cost mass-produced sticks. You can trace every single stripe on the stick, even though the stick is only less than 1cm in diameter.

For $4.50, you get only 12 sticks, possibly less than the RM2.30 Yan Yan. But given such high quality sticks, perhaps you only need one to make you feel heavenly.